Driver assistance systems are control systems for vehicles or intelligent vehicle technologies that aim at increasing the comfort and safety of traffic participants. Potential applications of such systems include lane departure warning, lane keeping, collision warning or avoidance, adaptive cruise control and low speed automation in congested traffic.
Driver assistance systems in the context of the present invention can thereby “assist” an action triggered or performed by a driver, but can also autonomously start and carry out a control action for the vehicle.
One of the above mentioned applications typically uses a manifold of separate sensors and electronic control units (ECUs) for sensor control, analyzing the sensor data and generating suitable output signals. For example, RADAR (RAdio Detecting And Ranging), and LIDAR (Light Detecting And Ranging) sensors can accurately measure distances to sensed objects, but they cannot provide any semantic information related to the sensed objects (e.g. in which lane a vehicle is located, what kind of object is being sensed). Such information needs additionally to be gathered by a video camera or cameras.
Due to the general tendency to increase safety and support driver and passengers with new comfort functions, the complexity of each of the applications as well as the number of applications within a modern vehicle is increasing and will increase further in the future. Basically, a vehicle with several sensor systems means a respective number of ECUs, where all the ECUs perform their tasks independent from the others.
Conventional vehicles have a bus system, for example the CAN (“Controller Area Network”)—bus, with which most or all ECUs are connected. The CAN-bus allows to exchange data between the connected ECUs. However, it turns out that by just adding together several sensors and/or applications and interconnecting them with a bus, only simple driver assistance systems can satisfactorily be constructed regarding aspects like reliability or stability and robustness.
Nevertheless it is a goal to further enhance safety, offer more comfort functions and at the same time limit costs for the development of such new and/or enhanced safety and comfort features. Thus what is needed is a system and method that integrates the up-to-now separated sensor systems into a single information system, which actively controls the vehicle and/or assists the vehicle operator.
However, no such general model of behavior generation is known. Existing assistance driver systems comprise a sensor or several sensors and subsequent sensor data processing steps specifically designed for a particular application. To implement a further application, essentially a redesign of the system is required.